on.
For oh, I know, in the dust where we have buried The silenced races and all their abominations, We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
There in the deeps That churn the frankincense and ooze the myrrh, Cypress shadowy, Such an aroma of lost human life!
They say the fit survive, But I invoke the spirits of the lost. Those that have not survived, the darkly lost, To bring their meaning back into life again, Which they have taken away And wrap inviolable in soft cypress-trees, Etruscan cypresses.
Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma5 still.
Fiesole. 1923
How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species?
Presentable, eminently presentable? shall I make you a present of him?
Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen? Doesn't he look the fresh clean englishman, outside? Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
Oh, but wait! Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man's need, let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new demand on his understanding
5. A/tec war chief or emperor of ancient Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest early 16th century.
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THE SHIP OF DEATH / 2283
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue. Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully. 15 Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence, a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species? Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
20 standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable? and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.
And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long. Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside 25 just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings rather nasty? How beastly the bourgeois is!
30 Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England what a pity they can't all be kicked over like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly into the soil of England.
1929
The Ship of Death1
I
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
5 And it is time to go, to bid farewell to one's own self, and find an exit from the fallen self.
II
Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
IO The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.
1. Lawrence is remembering 'the sacred treasures Etruscan tombs and described in his bookEtniscan of the dead, the little bronze ship of death that Places (1932). should bear him over to the other world,' found in
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228 4 / D. H. LAWRENCE
And death is on the air like a smell of ashes! Ah! can't you smell it?
And in the bruised body, the frightened soul 15 finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold that blows upon it through the orifices.
III
And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?2
With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make 20 a bruise or break of exit for his life; but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?
Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder ever a quietus make?
IV
O let us talk of quiet that we know, 25 that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet of a strong heart at peace!
How can we this, our own quietus, make?
